One thing leading to the notion that marriage = the death of drama, I think, is that in much of the fiction we grew up with, marriage does mark the end of the story. In fairy tales, the happily-ever-after means that there's no more to the story--or at least, implicitly, nothing worth telling. So there's a definite literary pattern that may be hard for some folks to see beyond. Once the Handsome Prince kisses Snow White or Sleeping Beauty awake and brings her home, the story is over. He's already completed his goal (finding a bride, presumably in order to procreate) and might as well retire. The bride, for her part, probably never leaves the castle grounds again. They have done what they were created to do--overcome interesting obstacles in order to find love/marriage/family. Once they've done that, there's no drama, no tension. Once they've done that, what else is there?
You see it in movies as well, particularly in older movies but in a number of more modern films as well--the film ends when boy gets girl, kiss, fade. What happens next? Not important.
And regardless of what you think of the whole theme, you must admit that it can be satisfying to the reader to have that sort of conclusion, that sort of closure. The reader (or, in the case of movies, viewer) is not left wanting more because there is no more. The piece stands alone.
However, this is a pretty useless pattern when you're dealing with episodic fiction. You can shake it up or you can maintain status quo, either can work, but you can't have a marriage be "happily ever after" as you can with a movie or novel. The characters have to come back next month, and the month after, and hopefully for many issues to come. They have to do something interesting in order to do this. And if your entire storyline hinged on romantic tension, on the love story, then yes, marriage (the attainment of a goal) is going to be problematic.
But shouldn't there be more going on in a superhero comic than just a love story? If the state of a character's love life is what determines the type of story that can be told, there really needs to be more going on in the book.
Anyway, I'd like to comment on a few things the folks at Comics Should Be Good said.
Nevertheless, that is the commonly held belief — you get married, you instantly become dull.
There is, actually, a little bit of truth to this. Certainly not from the point of view of the married, but my husband and I definitely provide less quality gossip for our circle of friends than the single folks do. And speaking of gossip, it certainly seems to center on love lives more than anything else, due to a certain amount of prurience inherent in human nature. There are moral dilemmas having nothing to do with romance--many of them far more interesting than yet another unrequited love or cheating boyfriend--but you'd never know it from scanning the headlines at the grocery-store checkout counter. It's what we're used to seeing presented as interesting.
It may also be that the more interesting parts of being married are more difficult to portray--marriage isn't an end, it's a process, and like any relationship it changes over time. Yet in fiction, marriage is typically portrayed as an end.
What marriage really gets rid of, plot-wise, is only a certain sort of availability--a character who is married is no longer available to participate in single characters' love stories. (Usually. There were some old Avengers stories that had some fun with this.) But, again--aren't superhero comics about more than love stories?
Weirdly, all the people who are complaining that marriage is a terrible idea for comics characters are okay with Reed and Sue Richards in the Fantastic Four, who’ve been married for most of the book’s history… over forty years, in fact.
True enough, which makes me think that the real problem some folks have is with change rather than with marriage per se. Reed and Sue have been married (hell, had a kid) ever since I've been reading FF, and I'm pretty old. Before that, they were established as a dating couple--sure, Namor showed up a few times, but there was never any sense that Sue really wanted anyone except Reed. We're used to Reed and Sue being married. More importantly, we've never seen either of them actively single--no dating others, no series of boy/girlfriends. For Reed and Sue, marriage is the status quo.
On the other hand, take a character who's got a history of dating around, say Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, and marry them off? I can see the complaints from here. It'd have to be a strong storyline to make that work.
I personally don't much care whether Spider-Man is married or not, because I'm not particularly a Spider-Man fan. Doesn't bother me if he is, doesn't bother me if he isn't. But as some folks have said, he's been married for quite a while--for a significant portion of his fan base, married Spider-Man is his status quo. They've never read him unmarried. They've never seen Peter on the dating scene. And it doesn't seem to have affected his popularity, as far as I can tell.
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